Tech firm teams with info icon

Concentric Sky, a Eugene Web development firm, is teaming up with Encyclopaedia Britannica to develop numerous applications for iPhones, Blackberries and Android-based “smart phones.”

If, for example, you are out and about today and happen to wonder: When did people start celebrating the new year, you can get an authoritative answer in seconds. (Answer: “The earliest-known record of a new year festival dates from about 2000 B.C. in Mesopotamia,” according to Britannica.)

Sure, you could wait until you could get to a computer and Google it. But you’d have to slog through blogs and marketing pitches and anything else the search engine dredged up. Then, you still might wonder whether you really had the definitive answer.

Founded in 1768, the privately held Encyclopaedia Britanica has a centuries’ old reputation for providing reliable information.

Many people — namely those who grew up pre-Internet — think of Britannica as the set of tomes they turned to for help with their school reports. Britannica still prints its 32-volume set for customers who prefer that format. But Britannica was the first encyclopedia on the Internet in 1994, said Tom Panelas, a company spokesman in Chicago. Today it is a digital publisher, and online products generate most of its revenue, he said.

Britannica’s move to make its huge cache of information accessible from mobile handheld devices is just the next step in providing information in ways that consumers want it, Panelas said.

“Reference information is the kind of information you want when your curiosity is aroused,” he said. “You want to be able to look it up the moment the question arises. With mobile devices that’s increasingly possible and easy to do.”

Britannica will work with Concentric Sky to roll out 10 to 12 mobile applications in the first year, said John Russell, Britannica’s senior manager of business development.

The applications would range from general interest offerings, such as “This Day in History,” “Biography of the Day, “Quote of the Day,” or “Quiz of the Day” to specific reference guides, created to tie in with student curricula, he said.

The price of the applications, available through iTunes and other carriers, would range from free to up to a one-time cost of maybe $4.99, Russell said.

Britannica and Concentric Sky would share the revenue generated, he said.

Britannica initially contacted Concentric Sky about three months ago and was impressed by the firm’s work, and founder Wayne Skipper, Russell said.

“We liked some of the work they had done with other partners like NASA,” Russell said. “We liked the vision that Wayne Skipper had laid out to us — where he saw taking our brand and our content, leveraging it with what we have out there now.”

In partnership with NASA, Concentric Sky last year released the free “Astronomy Picture of the Day” iPhone application.

With more than a quarter-million users, “It’s our most popular application so far,” Skipper said.

He said he wanted to partner with Britannica because “their brand is known around the world, and they’re well-positioned to become an authoritative source of information on the Internet.”

Today, when users search the Internet with an encyclopedia-type question, they’re mainly directed to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a Web-based, free encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Critics say its open editing process makes it vulnerable to errors and vandalism. (Wikipedia said in 2009 that it was imposing more controls on articles about living people.)

By contrast, Britannica “is written by experts and edited by professionals,” spokesman Panelas said. “Everything is fact checked before it’s published, and that produces a level of reliability that many people want and recognize.”

Initially Concentric Sky will put two or three employees on the Britannica project, Skipper said. The firm has about 20 employees and 15 contract employees, and is advertising a few openings, mainly for hard-to-find software engineers, he said.

Development time for mobile applications ranges from about a week for a straightforward reference guide, to up to a month or two for a more complex application, Skipper said.

“We’re trying to build ‘apps’ so they can work on multiple devices — not just iPhone — and that takes some extra care and forethought,” he said.

Concentric Sky has released about 30 iPhone and about 12 Android applications.

Skipper said he sees great potential for smart phones.

“It’s a powerful trend in the market,” he said. “It’s not going away any time soon. I think we’ll see a lot more computing power in smaller packages, and people will start to see more and more use in these devices.”

A 2008 Pew Research Center survey of Internet leaders, activists and analysts predicted that by 2020, “the mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in world.”